Chimera
by Arevhat
Summary: Remember you must fall together. Crais & Talyn, S2.


Disclaimer: Farscape and its characters belong to the Jim Henson Company and not to me.  
Setting: Between _OOTM_ and _TUT_but with spoilers through _ITLD_.  
Rating & Warnings: PG for peril and such.  
Author's Note: This was written as part of the Crais ficathon, for misaditas who requested S2, Crais & Talyn, and an explanation of why Crais wanted to replace Talyn's cannon with a dampening net. It went a bit sideways, but I like it. As always, feedback is very much appreciated

_________

CHIMERA

Remember gravity.

Remember Tauvo falls faster than you, his body drawn out, toes pointed. He strives for height - for freedom - and hurls himself over the edge, a blurred spindle of a boy.

Remember you hold yourself close, knees to chest, forehead to knees. You strive for density - for purpose - and plunge after your brother. Blades of hunta grass graze skin, stones thrust into flesh. You laugh as you tumble past Tauvo; he laughs too, spun sideways by a hollow in the earth, his body arcing a scythe in the grass. He comes to rest on his belly, only halfway down the slope, but you're still falling.

Surging.

Remember you hold yourself close, knuckles as white as the winter sun that saturates the air, as white as the pain that spills from the jagged stone buried in your neck. A Peacekeeper ship rends the sky, his engines gasping as he plunges after his brother. _Stay close to Tauvo_, your father says, but you're still falling.

Careening.

Remember you are forty cycles, not ten. Remember you are inside the Command Carrier – _you are in starburst_ - and not the mountains of Prybella. Remember you are falling with Talyn, not Tauvo. Remember you must fall together.

Hands locked behind your neck now, cradling Talyn as he cradles you as you cradle him. _Slowly_, he says, you say, _stay close to me_. The transponder bleeds in time with your pulse, fusing flesh and metal and memory in a perfect circle; and this is how it is when there are no edges and this is how it is when there is only light and --

Metal snaps, bones twist. Your hull, your body, shudders as you convulse. The link severs and there is no one to hold on to as you fall out of starburst.

Bialar Crais chokes on the air he tries to breathe, and falls, alone. Out of bed, on to hands and knees, sweat slicked skin cold against Talyn's floor. Their heartbeats clash, sharp and chaotic in the dark.

Crais sits with his back to the wall, grasping as the future slips away.

In a quarter arn all he has left is a flickering, formless dread.

* * *

Talyn believes it began with the Halosians, with the weapons fire that chased them into starburst, and the blast wave that pounded them against the edge of the rift between time and space. He tells Crais something is broken.

Crais can feel it too – a growing wrongness that scritches and scratches at the corners of his mind – but he cannot find it, cannot fix it. He runs every diagnostic three, four, five times; rebuilds whole systems piece by piece until his hands shake and bleed. An inspection of Talyn's outer hull reveals only superficial scorch marks.

Talyn, sullen and sore, says maybe he isn't the broken one.

* * *

Remember gravity, and the languid pull of sleep.

Remember how it winds around your limbs, and binds you like a sacrifice. Wreathed in vines, your body nurtured by the hot, fetid earth, the air like syrup in your mouth and lungs. The weight of this world settles on your chest, your shoulders, and burns like fire.

Aeryn says, _I'm a part of Talyn_, but she chose Crichton over you.

Remember they've run you to ground; but you could fly if you weren't held here by the jungle growing within you, by a mother's hands. She strips you bare and pushes you beneath the surface. Sleep pulls but you can't sink enough to dream, to not feel this pain. This loss.

Remember your mother chose to love you, her queer child conceived to fill the ranks. Remember she let you go.

Gravity saturates time and space.

Sleep, and remember gravity shifts inside starburst.

* * *

You wake in space, flames licking the sky, panic roiling in your belly.

You strive for freedom. You aim your cannon at Moya and her cruel hands, and fire at will.

* * *

Crais grasps and memory stills, smeared across his mind like paint on canvas: Talyn and Moya, himself and Xhalax Sun. He remembers Talyn's cannon as a pulse pistol, and feels the recoil in his bones.

_I would never shoot my mother_, Talyn says, furious. Fitful. He kicks out at a passing asteroid and it crumbles to dust.

Crais is patient but strained. _You already have_.

Talyn says, _That was you_.

It's a brazen lie of youth, but for a microt, Crais believes him.

* * *

In the med bay, Crais pulls the transponder from his neck. It lays in his palm, a perfect, disquieting creature.

He places the transponder on the floor and covers it with the heel of his boot; closes his eyes and prays for the strength to grind down, prays the crunch will not be the same as Lt. Teeg's neck.

Strength does not come. Words of remorse stick in his throat.

* * *

His own physical is as clean as Talyn's; but Crais keeps the transponder tucked inside his coat, close to his chest. He roams the quiet corridors of his gunship and remembers this began with a distant shore leave, with night riding on Niklos IV, and the wild leviathans that had danced with their prowlers beneath the stars.

He had been twenty-four and a Wing Commander, but Bialar Crais had never seen a leviathan in the flesh. Six had flown with them that night, curious and golden. He remembers the thrill of their gravity play, the stark elegance of their movements. After an arn, the Peacekeepers had left the skies to lay like children in the damp grass by the sea until sunrise had chased the leviathans into deeper space.

Darinta had wept against his neck when she thought no one would see and Tauvo had been humbled into silence; but Bialar had been transfigured. Where the others had seen only beauty, he had seen power and promise.

A way to distinguish himself. To be more.

Fifteen cycles later and all Bialar Crais wants is _less_. His whole world is stained crimson by blood and revenge, ambition and anger, desecration and death, and he cannot lose another brother.

He cannot lose the little he has left of himself.

* * *

Crais remembers the way leviathans play with gravity, and understands. He reattaches the transponder and explains how to straighten the kink – the temporal distortion – that resulted from their last starburst.

Talyn is calmer than before, almost happy, but Crais can feel the violence that resides in them both, and knows what he has to do. _I told you it began with the Halosians_, Talyn says.

Bialar says, _I'm so sorry_.


End file.
